Creating a multiboot usb drive and Misc.

[bizcuit]

Probably nothing new to many a BBq'er but spent a good chunk of time yesterday dorking with making a multiboot usb. Am not there yet but came across a few cool things while messing with the topic.

This Arch-wiki page has a lot of related goodness laying out different approaches to making one. Bunch of grub entry examples for a metric ton of diff distro's and refers to a couple Github projects, which are supposed to make it really easy to make and manage a multiboot usb. Finding the right entry to add to grub-legacy or grub2 has caused me and no doubt many a nixer to pull out a handful of hair.

This helped me to better understand the usage of gdisk.

Edit: Though is kinda sparse in a few key ways too imo. Such as how to fire up gdisk.

Run lsblk, mount ... whichever command to find your usb device. In the below example am using a usb which is showing up as sdb. Simple enough to get gdisk to work on it, as root just type. "gdisk /dev/sdb" of course without the quotes and it'll fire up asking for further commands.

And along the way, went ahead and installed rEFInd to be my UEFI/GPT bootmanager. Gives instructions for installing on several varieties of gnu/Nix. Pretty straight forward for whichever someone is using. I really like the thing, gives a good looking boot menu screen, plenty of themes someone can install etc etc.

Now the backstory babble. Finally decided to get rid of window$ on the pc. Window$ was sitting on 100gbs of diskspace, hardly ever use it and my feelings about Microsoft are well babbled about. Thought screw it time to get rid of their software. So that's what I did, formatted the win8.1 partition and reclaimed my diskspace for something I actually want on the system.

Of course being a dork, wasn't enough. Was also left with a MSR = microsoft reserved partition and a lil 400mb partition at the front of the drive, which is-was the WinRE = Win recovery environment that used to go to an OEM recovery partition I'd long since deleted. So biz went into delete partition frenzy mode.

Wham MSR gone, Wham winRE gone and after backing up the Nix related stuff on the systems ESP/efi partition WHAM the ESP partition too. Oops, that's where things got a lil hairy. Should've been a simple matter of just setting up a new one and marking it with the boot flag, copying over the backups and called it good.

Screwed this up and left me with a system saying, "please install an operating system." Arghhhhhh, was thinking I'd borked the disks GPT table and for awhile sweating bullets. Finally just resorted to installing another LM OS and that recovered things enough to boot w/o having to chroot any of the OS's with live media.

Remembered rEFInd and went ahead and installed it, overwrote the temp LM install and everything was/is back to running happily. Though after dorking with rEFInd and liking the thing thought I'd share and mention it at the Grill. It's a pretty cool lil piece of software. One thing I found and like, it installs icons on the boot menu screen. Use the arrow keys to go back/forth, press Enter to select and when one is highlighted and you have several kernels installed for that one/OS, press the F2 key and it lets you select whichever you want to boot.

Second nix adventure: Been wanting to try Kali Linux for a long time. Downloaded their latest release, chose the light variety, it's 1.1gbs. Go to make an install usb with the dd command anddddd hell no, over and over just won't work. Still haven't managed it but this got me onto the whole multiboot usb project. Making definite progress, the usb is booting in full UEFI/GPT mode and atm, goes directly to a grub> rescue screen. Because I don't have any .iso's in the usb's data partition yet. That's planned for later.

Am not planning on using one of those Github projs. It's now become a personal thing and I want to do it by hand but they looked good and the Arch-wiki reference is pretty dang rich in good info and the gdisk link helped me learn to use the util. So again ... just decided to share and babble some about it.

[bizcuit]

Random babble about more things rEFInd could be useful for. Though (unconfirmed) atm, aka: cbiz madcapped Nix theories.

Since rEFInd scans the system everytime it boots for installed OS's and automagically adds them to the boot menu, was thinking may be able to setup a partition, install an iso there, poss uncompress the thing and that it (rEFInd) may pick up on it's initrd and initramfs. Perhaps being able to boot it. Thusly perhaps meaning someone could install it (or just give it a try) to another partition on the system, w/o cd-dvd-usb etc.

Know grub2 can do this and should be able to boot/install iso's locally. Though haven't gotten around to working out the how 2's in either of these. Long have remained of Nix 2do list, shrugs.

2nd: Fairly sure could use rEFInd in a/this multiboot usb project. Just set up a fat32, boot flagged partition at the front of the thumb drive, install rEFInd there and do kinda like the above, as with it on a pc. Create a data partition with the rest the space and put some iso's there. It's also supposed to allow custom boot entries to be added to it similar to grub.

I mean strictly speaking, UEFI wants to find an ESP partition on the front of the drive to boot into full uefi mode. Though it's a head scratcher for me. Looked at the LM17.2 thumb drive, which installed correctly and in UEFI/GPT mode. Since legacy boot is disabled in the laptops firmware. It's only got 1 partition. Assuming someone can create one big fat32/boot flagged partition on a usb drive. As long as the right files are there etc.

Whenever I run it in live environment and fire up gparted, gparted asks if it's a GPT drive and gripes about it not having a backup GPT table at the end of the drive. In accordance with the standard but hey the LM usb works fine anyway. In gparted have to hit yes, then tell it to ignore the issue and click ignore it again. Definitely don't want gparted trying to fix the thumbdrive for me.

Anyone done any of this kinda thing yet and willing to share some how to info about it ? Either with grub2, rEFInd or any other way, sharing is caring eh. :D

[franksinistra]

Mount ESP to /boot/EFI and install grub to point there so your ESP won't be clogged? iIrc that's what I did when I was dual-booting with osx a long time ago.

[bizcuit]

^Thanks fellow nixer,

I figured it out, ironically had figured out how to do this a long time ago. Had been trying to accomplish another goal back then, so forgot I'd already covered this deal. See this with only a few minor modifications to it.

When I copied the .zip he/Sysmatck provided over to the usb, after following the instructions for creating the usb and the fat32 filesystem on it. It complained that it wasn't allowed, permission ... blahblahblah. But I'd done the cp command as root so when checked the usb drive, the 3 directories were there anyway. One for boot, EFI and iso. The iso directory here is where you add your iso's. Just used the cp (copy) command in terminal to copy over my Kali linux iso to it.

I ended up having to cut/paste the iso directory into the boot directory. So that the path to the iso's I am using are correct in the grub entries I added. Also in the /boot directory on the usb, you'll find the grub directory in there. Click on that and inside the grub directory you'll find the grub.cfg file you use to add iso's menuentry's.

Here's the menu entry I ended up with, taken from and adapted from the Archwiki page in my 1st post here.

menuentry "kali-linux-2.0" {
set isofile='/boot/iso/kali32bit.iso'
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live findiso=$isofile noconfig=sudo username=root hostname=kali
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

Notes: As mentioned, the path to the iso's is going to be /boot/iso/ on the thumb drive as shown above. Of course you can always change it to whatever path you want too on the t-drive. When you 1st open the grub.cfg file, it'll be crowded with nonsense entries. I just selected all Control + a and deleted them. Added my menu entry above and saved. Good to go. I always tend to rename any files/isos with long drawn out names to make them easier to work with. As you can see, had renamed the Kali iso to kali32bit.iso.

That's about it, just add however many iso's you want to the /boot/iso directory on the usb drive and as long as you find-add a workable menuentry to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file ... should be good to go.

Started out with 14.93gbs on the thumb drive, have 13.84gbs left to add however many iso's I like. Pretty sweet, the zip Sysmatck provides for download, comes with kinda overkill it's got grub4dos and just about all someone should need to boot any fricken system. Whether bios-mbr to UEFI-GPT and all points in between.

Anyway, confirmed as working. This laptop has legacy-CSM disabled in the firmware. Set it to give usb priority during boot. Stuck the t-drive in, fired the thing up and WHAM, booted Kali just fine. One pita should someone decide to do this, in the Kali live iso, default username is root, default password is toor.

Happy usb multibooting dudes ! Vll! :)

[machinebacon]

Would
https://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-mult ... ing-linux/
work?

[machinebacon]

And one more thing: is that thingy persistent or always live?

[bizcuit]

Not really sure Machine, haven't dorked with it beyond booting the Kali iso and haven't tried to install with it yet either. Either way, am sure it can be made to be persistent with enough fiddling with it but think ootb, it's likely just whatever's on the iso's someone's using.

Another cool thing that occurs to me is I should still be able to store data on the thing. Could just create a /data directory. Won't make any difference to the iso's in the /iso directory or to grub. Not that you can't do that with other drives with a Nix iso on them, shrugs. Planning on putting a bunch stuff like rescuecd's or whatever on the thing.

Could be a good tool for techies to add to their tool-belt. So atm, just happy to have the sucker booting Kali.

Vllbbq ! :)

Oops, pendrivelinux probably would've worked fine ... dunno. Wanted to learn to do this more by hand ... for now calling it a success.Oh yeah, also time to download me some bbq and fire that puppy up next. :)

[bizcuit]

Babble update: Yeah, apparently the kail nix usb's can support persistence Machine but not when it's in the form of an iso I don't think. Something made by a more conventional means of creating the usb ... then looks like yep.

Atm in terms of Kali am stuck in menuentry hell folks. Know can boot it just not yet sure of the magic lines/syntax to get it's installer to fire up. Live session works fine, is not persistent. Installer nope, can't find the right menuentry yet to get it to work.

Plenty of other examples of how to install via usb/iso on that Arch-wiki page. Not for Kali though. When I mount it with an image mounting util, look around in it. It has an install directory, a live directory and a few others. Each one of them holds a vmlinuz and initrd.gz but damned if I've yet figured out how to boot the installer on the iso.

Sheesh even many among the distro's userbase seem perplexed as to how to get this junk done. More than a few reporting success but they weren't using a multiboot usb with iso's on it !

Kali apparently uses syslinux as it's bootloader. Atm, throwing up my hands on this distro. Just burnt out on screwing with it. Several others look much easier to dork with. Still fairly well happy with the outcome of this dorkish proj. So far only lost a couple handfuls of hair.

Vll! :)

ps, they do have a mini.iso, that's supposed to provide the bare minimum to install it and then do the rest via network. Thinking about giving that a go, surely it doesn't have all this other junk on it getting in the way of me firing up the install process !?!?!?

ps2, beginning to think installing Kali to partition isn't worth the trouble. Just wanted all the misc tools/utils that come bundled in the distro to dork with but all of them are readily available via many other means too. Arghhhhh !

ps3babble, almost got it to do it's thing tried ... in the grub.cfg file.

menuentry "kali-linux-install" {
set isofile='/boot/iso/kali32bit.iso'
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/install/vmlinuz boot=install findiso=$isofile noconfig=sudo username=root hostname=kali
initrd (loop)/install/initrd.gz
}

But was complaining about whatever missing from the install cd. So chose the abort install option. Getting closer at least the installer is accessible.

[machinebacon]

random bacon bit: the only cool thing about kali is the hipster-hype marketing strategy "waaa look me is so leetgeek1337toorroot me even uses KALI!!!!111eleven1one!elf" without even doing anything for it, same shit like many arch users think... "if i wear this brand of shoes i will shoot more goals"-shit. funny that nobody thinks the same about grml (which i admire).

apt is your <distro-of-choice>. debian netinstall, add your poison, and forget all spin-offs. seriously.

[Theo]

^ Amen to that.

[bizcuit]

^Amen +2, as usual you make a good point Baconator. Starting to think some of the butt pains associated with this may be like an Arch entry test. The whole what is the output of xyz on the Arch forum registration. Of course for many that only takes 30secs, cut/paste into terminal, copy/paste terminal output into registration page. IM IN! It's official, I'm now uber L33T!!! Was kinda getting the same vibe from Kali.

They (Kali) just has a bunch of interesting penn testing junk conveniently wrap into one OS, there are others in that niche and no doubt any of those pieces of software are available for any other distro too and perhaps newer versions etc. Pretty much just leaving it the way it is. Since it's "based" on Debian may get around to adding it's repos to other stuff. Who knows and shrugs.

Still this approach to making a multiboot usb I do think is interesting. As with anything gnu/Linux, plenty of proj(s) and ways to go about it though. Guess it's worth looking at a few. Still clearly have much to learn about this tech topic. Tried to extract the iso on the thumb drive, to make it easier to define file paths in grub but fat32 doesn't support symlinks. However setting up a separate ESP-fat32 partition and then making an ext2 data partition should allow for it ?

[bizcuit]

Just more babble.

apt is your <distro-of-choice>. debian netinstall, add your poison, and forget all spin-offs. seriously.

Pretty much what I've opted for too. Though there are valid distro's floating around from what I've seen, even if it's just due to the maintainers knowledge and preferences. Stuff like #!, anything you decide to put out, others. The ways whichever maintainers choose to deviate from the norm config's elected by official Debian devs ... whatever else. Can be good examples to others as to what can be done but end of day, it's gnu/Nix do with as you will/can.

Vll!

[bizcuit]

Further babble about this:

Went ahead and copied over a systemrescuecd.iso and a gpartedlive.iso I had sitting around to the usb's /iso directory and added menu entries for them with slight modification from the ones shown on the Arch-wiki page to the usb drives grub.cfg.

Both booting and apparently work fine. Gparted hung for a bit and needed some manual config choices made ( choose lang/keyboard) but eventually fired up and seemed to be working fine. Systemrescue did better and since it already has a version of gparted live included, went ahead a got rid of the actual gparted live iso and menu entry. Why have several of the same util taking up diskspace ?

Known quirks on this laptop, seems none of the live media have the modules to support my touchpad, it works but tapping on it (the pad) to do stuff doesn't. I have to hit one of the touchpads left/right buttons to click on stuff, shrugs.

Oh well bottomline, this method of making a multiboot usb drive seems to work well enough. Tested and babble approved >(CB).

Some other random obs about this. Some of the things provided by the guy I learned this from are kinda dated, the grub2 v used for example shows up as beta something. However all of these can be updated by whoever wants to employ better/newer versions of these things. Once someone has the general idea of how it works, they can improve as they see fit.

One more babble about this dorkishness. Of course there's no shortage of other and likely better ie: utils to create, stock iso's and manage multiboot iso's onto a usb drive, available online and no doubt MUCH easier than the method here. Atm now I'm stuck trying to figure out which iso's are worth putting onto the t-drive, have 13+ gbs of space burning a hole in my pocket. :P

Any suggestions welcome fellow nixers. Am lazy but will do some googling looking for interesting candidates too.

[machinebacon]

^ if the "beta" in GRUB2 is disturbing you: GRUB2 has always been beta (even the EFI versions, and even in sid), so don't blame the guy ;)

https://packages.debian.org/sid/grub-pc
https://packages.debian.org/sid/grub2

[bizcuit]

^Thanks Machine, didn't know that. Am going to say it's reasonable to assume that some of the newer releases are better, have capabilities older one's don't ? Per usual MB knows his stuff. :)

Another gripe I've got with this dork-method I'm messing with. Is having the whole drive formatted fat32. Realized it limit's iso file size to 4gbs or less. Not a massive deal regardless but may eventually get sucked back down this rabbit-hole and dork with setting up a fat32/boot flagged ESP partition and a few diff one's to store the actual iso's.

ie: With the right stuff in the ESP partition, should boot in full UEFI/GPT mode no problem, with an ext2 /boot partition, with junk like kernels-etc stored in it. Should be able to use full usb-disk encryption on the /data partition ? As people do on lap-desktop systems. (which I'd probably try formatting that data partition as ext2-3-4, don't need a journaled filesystem on a usb drive me thinks and can be disabled in ext3-4 anyway.) For the time being am burnt out on this tech proj.

Nother edit: Of course as you've/Baconator already pointed out. There's gawds only know how many better utils to create multiboot thumbdrives and it's probably a matter of a couple clicks to get this type of thing done using them.

[bizcuit]

Also just 4 record babble:

Have had grml installed onto LM17.2 for a long time (or at least one of it's utils/tools?). Thing is supposed to let you boot iso's from disk and if remember correctly even install them when you stick the iso's into it's directory. You stick the iso's into /boot/grml. Just noticed I've still got an AntiX and a LMDE iso in there. Something else that's been on the tech dork 2do list for quite awhile.

/etc/default/grml-rescueboot
/usr/share/doc/grml-rescueboot
/usr/share/doc/grml-rescueboot/README
/usr/share/doc/grml-rescueboot/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/grml-rescueboot/copyright
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/grml-rescueboot
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grml-rescueboot.conffiles
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grml-rescueboot.list
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grml-rescueboot.md5sums
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grml-rescueboot.postinst
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grml-rescueboot.postrm

Something MANY others have already been doing for the LONGEST time. Install iso from hdd to another partition-etc. Would be cool, no more need of using cd-dvd-usb and I remember all the folks griping about a cd sized iso at #! Central.

Edit: AHA! Been wanting to dork with Lmde for quite a bit too. Played with it via that grml util but why not try it out on this usb thing too.

[bizcuit]

Update: Interesting related babble discovery.

By mentioning grml you may've saved my bacon Machine ( pun definitely intended :P) or at least saved some time. You reminded me about grml-rescue, so dorked with it. Apparently it automatically adds menu entries for whichever iso's you stick into /boot/grml when someone runs the update-grub command, it updates entries on that main OS's grub.cfg file to include those iso's.

The grub entries are a bit different in syntax though. Not exactly meant for iso's on a usb drive. Still though gives someone something to work with, shows what modules need to be loaded to boot them too. So stuck the Kali.iso in there, sudo update-grub and at least have something more to look over in an effort to get the sucker to boot it's installer.

This could be another weapon to add to whoevers arsenal, when it comes to the battle of finding the right grub menu entry and not ripping out all of my/your hair in the process. :D Have also fought with this issue when xyz-distro was installed to hdd too but didn't want to install it's bootloader to mbr or whatever.

Also wishing distro's would have a default location on the iso's where someone can find such an grub menu entry and they may well have this info somewhere on the iso. Just a matter of finding it, arghhhhh.

Yep more babbling:

Think I found a critical point or at least a decent step forward in mitigating some of the butt pains assoc with this junk. That being that many things designed to boot from iso, apparently expect to be on a cd and will search for and not find such a thing, thus fail.

That's what Kali was complaining about. One person recommended trying to mount it to /cdrom on the system to attempt to fool it into thinking there was a cd media present. Anyway just adding this, see this. Ans #1, some relevant stuff which may help anyone facing menu entry hades.

^ Which is a good idea too. Have seen people talking about converting vm's into actual installs and vice versa. Though am not a Kvm ninja as yet either.

Viva la Baconator !!!

[bizcuit]

Well got LMDE to boot, found the magic grub menu entry for it. Though atm, am booted into it and dist-upgrading it. Waiting to see how spectacularly it breaks. The iso is something over 1yr old. Though it booted/installed fine by the dork multiboot usb method I'd ripped off and shown above. So yeah, great I guess. Stuck it on a 20gb ext4 testing partition and not likely to keep it around for long. Even if the dist-upgrade doesn't bork it beyond all recognition.

Will post the menu entry used in a bit if anyone gives a fark anyway. :) Get the distinct feeling nobody is these parts of the Nixsphere have much interest in dorking around with Lmde. Vll!

[machinebacon]

^ those days, was it in 2011 or 2012 (?) I installed LMDE and it fucking broke even without upg. Today, I don't see much value in it. Not that it had much value those days, actually I never really understood Linux Mint's concept, apart from collecting donations and spreading anti-semitic BS.
Debian netinstall + tasksel MATE would give you something very similar, I guess, with less patching. Of course I understand you want to experiment and break that fucker, so -- continue :D

Q: What makes Linux Mint different compared to Ubuntu or Debian beyond the visual changes?

Clem: I'm not really sure. It never "had" to be different. We're already radically different in the way we work, in what we think is or isn't important, in the vision of the desktop we have, in how we look at security and package updates... so with all that we've often evolved in opposite directions. Now, from a technical point of view, if you look at Linux Mint, it is either using an Ubuntu or a Debian package base, so beyond the desktop layer (where we're primarily focused) you'll find very few differences.

[bizcuit]

^Pretty much it Machine ... surprisingly the dang thing survived well enough. Am shocked really, was anticipating total implosion. Had to run "sudo apt-get -f install" but other than that, it's sitting on that partition, 4gbs of disk used after running bleachbit.

Haven't really given it a fair chance but off the top, not sure why I wouldn't do what you've/Machine's advised and go with a netinstall. Impression of Lmde (after 20mins)... too much stuff jammed and config'ed into it for my taste. Pretty much how someone would expect to find things with LM main ootb. Only at least Debian based and thought supposedly rolling release.

menuentry 'LMDE2' {
set isofile='/boot/iso/lmde2.iso'
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live config fromiso=/dev/sdb1/$isofile
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.lz
}

That's the grub menu entry that worked to boot/install via usb/iso. Still actually like LM, doubt this Lmde install will stay around very long. Plus they cheated me out of the expected software fireworks !!!! Don't know about any anti-semitic views whoever assoc with the project has expressed. Will read the link. Agree with you of course. Seriously doubt the nixers here have much use for LM.

Either opting for custom Debian, your stuff or a mixture of gawds only know how many others on hdd or vm-etc. Really just wanted to see how badly the thing would bork up after being so outdated. Nope ... sucker seems to be working fine. Going to remove it from the usb and look for stuff that could actually prove useful. Probably overwrite the thing ( Lmde) soon enough too.